I think it’s a neat skill to have at the moment, but not very meaningful when it comes to pure application and infrastructure development and design. What you can accomplish with GPT is still possible with Google, and well, GPT info needs to be googled or reviewed in some way as well.
My main use case is to ask it other ways to approach solving problems I already understand. Sometimes it reveals interesting ideas others have already had, which I like. The other day I was using promises in the JS world to create a sort of sequence of who-knows-when-it’ll-finish tasks, and GPT pointed out that what I actually wanted was an async generator. Kind of obvious but also, not at all — people rarely reach for generators in the JavaScript world. So that was cool.
Despite a fair amount of experimentation and building basic stuff with the API, this has been my most valuable use case yet which has real rewards. I made a tool which uncovers solutions to error stacks I pipe into it (in VS Code or in a standalone situation where it listens to your app’s errors), and it was interesting, kind of worked, but was mostly just a time sink. It could be fine tuned and I’m sure Co Pilot X will solve this elegantly, but there’s no real magic underneath this. You don’t need to know it. You’d figure it out fairly quickly if you needed to.
The secret sauce in AI isn’t something you learn easily, on the other hand. That’s a career in and of itself, and it’s not trivial to pursue. For the time being, I think it’s totally fine not to adopt these tools as a developer. Just keep an open mind to it, explore when you feel interested, and continue focusing on doing what humans do well but machines don’t.